Darkfast Dungeons – Print and Play

In this post, we take a look at something different. Today, we take a look at Darkfast Dungeons, by Okumarts Games. I would classify Darkfast Dungeons as Dungeon Crawler that should scratch the itch of Board Gamers and Skirmish Miniatures Gamers alike. Like other games, there are also RPG (Role Playing Game) elements to the game.

Yes, those miniatures in the picture above are paper and look pretty good! The nice thing about gaming with paper is that it is cheap and easy to do. The terrain and miniatures come already “painted” right off of your printer, and I like the artistic style. David Okum, the designer of Darkfast Dungeons, hosted me through my first game at SkyCon 2018.

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Now, let’s take a closer look at the game. This post is both a Battle Report and quick reflection of my experience Exploring Darkfast Dungeons.

The Components

Darkfast Dungeons is a Print and Play Game.

As you will see through out this post, the components are really nice with some great artwork on the heroes and dungeon models. One thing to keep in mind though is that it takes work to print and assemble this game. It is not playable as soon as you purchase it. You have to assemble it. That said, I have assembled paper models in the past and making them is just part of the fun.

To start Darkfast Dungeons, you choose a hero and draw Random talents. In this game, I played as two heroes. One as a Fighter, and the other as a Skull Adept. Below is the card for my fighter and the random talents I drew for my character. Just great. My Fighter was stupid! That card prevented him from acting how I wanted him to for a few turns. 🙂

A sample character card along with some random traits.

After getting my characters ready, I went down into the dungeon.

Into Darkfast Dungeons

I chose to go with a Fighter and a Skull Adept (a mix between a clerk and a funky mage).

The Dungeon started as a single room. Each time we went to an entrance and checked the next room, a random room was determined by a roll of the dice. Our objective was to explore a certain number of rooms in the dungeon and then escape alive. Of course, we are to take as much loot as we can too!

We entered the second room of the dungeon to find two coffins.

What is inside of the objects and rooms is also determined by dice rolls. David designed Darkfast Dungeons to run as a cooperative game with no GM necessary.

Something nasty possessed the next room. Not a monster, but rather an effect that makes allies fight each other.

At this point, the Fighter turned on the Skull Adept. Oh, oh!

The two allies turn on each other and fight. The Skull Adept is more in touch with his sanity and fights off the effect of the cursed room, but the fighter is going to cleave into him now! I thought we were allies. Time to run!

The Fighter attacks my Skull Adept (I did not name the characters). The Skull Adept runs, the Fighter pursues. Eventually, the Fighter comes back to his senses and the two encounter some monsters. The fighter dispatches them and the two encounter a Cultist (with stats close to the fighters). Through a series of bad rolls, the Fighter takes a lot of damage, but the Skull Adept charms the Cultist into joining their side. Now the group consists of a party of three.

Recruits

Once I realized I could charm more than one creature at a time, and the effects were indefinite, I had a ball running my Skull Adept around and trying to increase the size of my war-party.

After the Cultist, I charmed a Winged- Imp-type creature to join my group.

That is my Skull Adept at the door trying to charm a Cultist Leader while an Imp Creature also attacks the leader.

I then tried to charm the Cultist Leader. The spell did not work, so I pushed forward my Cultist to provide protection. Around the table we made jokes about what the Cultist would say to his Leader after he switched to my side!

The Cultist came to my Skull Adept’s aid. Meanwhile, the Cultist Leader clubs the Skull Adept Hard. The next round, the Cultist would have to drop his former leader with a solid blow to the head with a mace.

Sadly, I could not recruit the Cultist Leader. At this point, both my Skull Adept and Fighter were nearly dead. The Cultist Leader killed my Winged-Imp so all that was left in good health was my Charmed Cultist. I needed to find some healing potions or something fast!

Pushing forward, the group comes across a Thug. The Skull Adept casts his last Charm spell and recruits the Thug into the group too.

The Healing Well

Luckily, the room on the opposite side of where we were happened to contain a healing well.

Perfect, a well! I hope it is a healing fountain! My Skull Adept rushes in for a drink.My Skull Adept takes a drink of healing water. It doesn’t heal him fully, but it certainly helps.

Trailing behind my Skull Adept was my Fighter, but he would die of his wounds.

The Fighter dies.

More Exploration

Deciding to split up the group, the Thug continues down one of the hallways and reveals a large number of rooms and collects a few treasure items from his own old room! Those items shall now belong to my Skull Adept once they come out of the dungeon. 🙂

We revealed a lot of rooms but ran out of new doors to explore. We have no choice but to go back down the first hallway that forced us to attack each other at the start of the game.So… I decide to keep my Skull Adept near the exit of the dungeon while sending my Thug and Cultist down the corridor that causes the group to turn on each other.

As you might have guessed, the Thug turns on my Cultist. Now, we did manage to push a little further and see the next room, but that is as far as we got.

The Thug and Cultist turn on each other. Being so far away from the action, it didn’t matter to my Skull Adept who won. Personally, I like miniatures of cultists, so I wanted the Cultist to win the battle.The Cultist Kills the Thug and starts heading towards my Skull Adept. Lucky for me, my Cultist comes back to his senses and leaves the Dungeon with his new master.

We did not explore the full dungeon, so we did not win – but the Cultist and Skull Adept left with their lives. That is still a win in some way.

Revealing the End

My Game Master stayed with me and discussed the game a little further. It is always exciting to play a well produced game with its designer and I liked staying around and chatting to David about his experiences. For the sake of interest, I rolled to see what the final room would have been. If we explored the whole dungeon, it would have looked as per the picture below. It is interesting to note that in order to win, I would have had to explore all rooms. I did not know that when I started as the Dungeon rooms were random.

The completed dungeon. Unfortunately, I never did make it to the last room. No victory. Maybe next time. 🙂

Eye Candy

Not all pictures that I took made it to the post above. Being that this game looks so nice on the table, I decided to include a section here of extra pictures. Hopefully you enjoy them too. While these paper miniatures and dungeon look good for the camera, they looked even better in person. Okumarts Games did a good job on the presentation of this product.

A cool looking room.My Cultist coming back for my Skull Adept. At this time, he was still crazy with blood on his mind. Fortunately for me, he would come to his senses before he ever reached my Skull Adept.That is my Skull Adept escaping the dungeon with a few treasures and his life.

Wrapping it up…

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing Darkfast Dungeons. We played with the base set, and some of the expansions. Of course, it makes the game even better that I played it with the game’s designer, David Okum.

If you are interested in checking out the product yourself, Okumarts Games has 120 items currently listed on DriveThruRPG. Many of those products are geared towards Darkfast Dungeons across various genres. There are also RPGs produced by his company and an absolute ton of paper terrain and miniatures.

The paper miniatures are a handy tool that could also be used in other games too, including miniatures games (like Frostgrave) and RPGs (like Dungeons and Dragons).

If you use the paper minis, you can buy special acrylic stands for them or build your own out of paper or foam board. Paper is just an affordable way to get into (or expand upon) gaming.

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3 thoughts on “Darkfast Dungeons – Print and Play”

I like the idea of print & play games (both commercial and free) but I don’t own a color printer, and taking the files to some shop where they can print them for a fee seems too much of a bother. And once I’m out of “instant gratification land”, I might as well play with proper minis 😉

I already had this problem with Ganesha’s “Sellswords & Spellslingers”, where if you buy the PDF version you need to print color cards with events and monsters. If you live in the US or some countries in Europe, you can buy print-on-demand cards from shops which have an agreement with Ganesha, but where I live there’s no way to do this. And printing quality color cards is impossible too (to my disappointment, I asked some people in the printing business and they told me “if you want custom poker cards, sure. Anything fancier, nope.”).

So I play with B&W cards I printed myself with my laser printer, and get toner all over my hands. Disappointing, because Sellswords & Spellslingers is such a cool game.

Nothing beats proper minis, but it is cool that there are different options out there. That sucks that you have a hard time getting cards printed for your games. Let us know if you ever find a good solution. Personally, I own just a Black and White Printer too, so I understand.

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